Why MAGA? Why now?

I think a lot about what is happening to us, and why, but I don't have any solid answers. It's always seemed odd to me that we don't talk about why more often. As a country, we've had a lot of success with democracy and the rule of law. Why don't more people care about those things now?

Although I don't have a solid answer, I think I can say a little bit about what a good explanation will look like:

• It should explain why MAGA has been happening over the past ten years, rather than ten years earlier, or ten years later.
• It should be able to explain the rise of illiberalism in several countries. In other words, the explanation shouldn't be too specific to the US.
• It should be able to explain the systemic nature of our collapse. The explanation has to cover voters, GOP politicians, the heads of large companies, newspapers, and so on.
• It should be consistent with the magnitude of the change. In other words, "Hillary didn't campaign in Michigan," doesn't seem good enough. If the first loss had been a fluke, if the GOP hadn't fallen in line, and if voters hadn't chosen Trump a second time, an explanation like that might work. But that's not our situation. What's happening seems pretty tectonic. With all due respect to the chaos butterfly, big and lasting changes come from big causes.
• It shouldn't be too reductive. If there was a smoking gun, we'd all know what it is by now. I think it's likely that there have been several stresses on the system, of different kinds, that have come together in an additive way to create the crisis.
• The explanation can't be entirely about ideas. There have to be facts on the ground that are driving things, at least in part. This doesn't mean that ideas don't matter. I believe they shape the way the changes we're seeing are being expressed, the shape they're taking.
• The explanation shouldn't rely on a broadspread decline in character, or on great figures making bad decisions.

I believe it's likely that the fundamental causes of MAGA are the changes created by shifts in media technology, and changes in how we consume information and choose what to believe. But I don't have any actual evidence that this is true.

I also believe it's helpful to think of our polity as an ecosystemm, with the collapse represented by MAGA being analogous to the failure of a rain forest or a coral reef. It's possible to say that a coral reef is dying because the ocean temperatures have risen, while still understanding that the actual collapse will be made up of a complex set of events that contain causal links between them. The warmer water might cause one species to die out near the reef, while the death of that species might create other knock on effects.

I'd like to finish this post by saying something about why I've come to this point. I want to try to show a little bit of my work, since I'm not very confident in my ideas.

Gordon Wood has been my biggest influence as I've tried to think this through. I don't believe the specific causes of the American Revolution have anything in common with the current crisis, but I think Wood's approach has a lot to each us about how to think about and understand the causes of historical events. In particular, what he says about changes in ideas being drivers of historical change have been important to me. The idea that vast changes require substantial causes comes from Wood.

On top of that, Anne Applebaum's The Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, has been very helpful. The second point, about the need to explain what's happening outside of the US as well as within it, is taken from Applebaum's book. But beyond that, her book describes what she knows about why many specific people, friends and colleagues into whom she has real insight, have embraced authoritarianism.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump's 2016 victory, I read Paxton's The Anatomy of Fasicsm. The first thing I took from Paxton was reassurance – it seemed clear that 2016 era MAGA wasn't a truly fascist movement. I no longer feel that to be true, though. But mostly I took the idea that fascism is less of an ideology and more ef a process that happens to a polity. This is more or less the foundation of my attempts to think through what's happening.

Finally, I understand that it's silly to take my own ideas so seriously. It's a little vain and certainly undeserved. But it's very hard not to think about what's happening, and to try to make sense of it.

Published: 2025-05-29

Tagged: blog